Anthropic’s Revenue Is Running at $47 Billion. Wall Street Is Already Pricing a Fivefold Increase By 2028.

Anthropic's potential blockbuster initial public offering is forcing Wall Street to look unusually far into the future, with the artificial intelligence company projecting annual revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion by 2028.

Rather than focusing primarily on current earnings or even next year's sales, bankers and investors are using revenue estimates two years into the future to determine how much the AI company could be worth, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with Anthropic's financials and the IPO process.

Anthropic said as recently as May that its revenue run rate, a measure reflecting its current pace of business, had surpassed $47 billion. A 2028 figure approaching $200 billion would therefore require the company to more than quadruple that level in roughly two years.

Revenue multiples are frequently used to value rapidly expanding software companies that have not yet developed mature profit margins. What is less common is applying those multiples to financial projections several years into the future.

There are recent precedents as investors considered 2028 revenue expectations ahead of Cerebras Systems' IPO this year, while projections for SpaceX extended as far as 2029 before Elon Musk's space company went public at a record valuation in June.

For Anthropic, Wall Street is also searching for the right publicly traded companies to use as benchmarks. Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX are among the businesses being considered as valuation comparables ahead of Anthropic's analyst day, Reuters reported.

The valuations are steep. Palantir trades at roughly 53 times expected 2026 revenue, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters, while SpaceX and Cloudflare are both valued at about 41.6 times expected revenue for this year.

Each provides investors with a different comparison. Palantir represents a rapidly growing business with significant AI exposure, Cloudflare offers a high-growth software and infrastructure benchmark, and SpaceX demonstrates how investors can value a company based partly on expectations for its eventual scale rather than its present-day financial results.

The central question for Anthropic is whether its enormous spending today can translate into substantially higher margins tomorrow. AI companies require huge investments, and those costs are currently putting pressure on margins across the industry and have contributed to investor concerns about the scale of AI spending.

Anthropic's growth, however, has been striking. Its revenue run rate stood at about $9 billion at the end of 2025 before climbing above $47 billion by May. The company has projected at least $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, more than twice the previous quarter, putting it on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.

Anthropic has also said its revenue run rate increased more than tenfold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. That trajectory is helping explain why investors are willing to base today's IPO calculations on what Anthropic could look like in 2028.

If model training and inference become more efficient and operating expenses grow more slowly than revenue, margins could expand dramatically as Anthropic scales. But investors would effectively be paying today for growth that still has to materialize.

David Merkel, principal at Aleph Investments, told Reuters that Anthropic could potentially reach a $2 trillion valuation, but questioned whether such a valuation would prove sustainable. The bigger issue, he said, is whether AI ultimately generates enough additional productivity to justify the enormous expectations now being built into companies such as Anthropic.